Mr. Jamie Drummond:

Absolutely. I draw the attention of the committee to a particular example. Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan mentioned the committee's visit to Mozambique. I have been paying a lot of attention to the situation there. It recently borrowed $2 billion, which then disappeared. If members do not know about the details of the case, I encourage them to look into it given that Ireland has, quite rightly, put a great deal of money into Mozambique over the years and achieved amazing results. Poverty and hunger have been halved. In the past couple of years, however, and in anticipation of natural resource revenues, things got a bit out of control. Contracts were made and a crazy PowerPoint project was put together, with some wild assumptions about the future revenues of a tuna fishing fleet. As a result, $2 billion was lent to the country without parliamentary oversight, scrutiny or knowledge.

Someone associated with the attorney general in that country allegedly signed off on something and now it has to pay back $2 billion that it did not know it had borrowed. Plainly, that is corrupt and, in our view, a crime on behalf of those who lent the money and on behalf of those who signed off on that money within the country. Both sides need to be held accountable along with those who aided and abetted that crime. The anatomy of this crime is something to which we need to pay attention.

As somebody who campaigned for debt cancellation and increased aid for Mozambique, I feel very passionately about this. I hope all the committee members will get irritated and angry about what they are hearing today, particularly if they have not heard about the matter previously. We have to stop that kind of thing happening because it undermines our aid programmes if it is allowed to go on. The missing piece was that the public accounts committee was not informed and so was not able to do its job. Across the continent, they are often not well capacitated and need more support. If the committee is thinking about technical assistant programmes or capacity building for those, that is a very good use of people's time and money.